Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

VITAL FORCE OF THE GOSPEL. 87
He did, was the Gospel ; and therefore, because it
belonged
to the region of life, it came with such vital impact to the
heart of mankind. Everywhere, as if a fresh shock from some
vital battery had struck them, men began, when its message
reached them, to live ;
and everywhere within the sphere of
the Church s influence there was light, love, energy, and hope.
And the fundamental reason was that the Church could tell
the eager wistful world, not what man thought about God,
which knowledge must be always as limited and variable as
man s understanding, but what God thought about man, said to
man, did for man, and was doing and would do for man
through eternity. Speculations about God, about life, about
duty, about destiny, must always be utterly without form and
substance, mere mists in cloudland, to the great mass of un
cultivated men. When the world for the first time heard with
faith, not what God might be supposed to think, feel, and pur
pose ;
but what God had thought, said, and done in our world,
then began upon earth that vital movement which has issued
in the regeneration of human
4
society.
The fatal defect in Philosophy was that it could never get
en fairly out of their own shadow. The philosopher was
always necessarily the centre to his world all
;
hung on his
own thoughts, feelings, convictions, and powers, and man can
never Sink into himself and rise redeemed. The religion of
which the individual man is the centre can never lay hold
on men, because what man needs most profoundly
is to escape
from himself; yet not to escape only, but to escape from
and yet possess himself.
Escape of one kind was always easy
to the philosopher. As we have seen, the noblest of them,
Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, as well as the most accom
plished of them, Seneca, always kept
suicide. But what gospel could escape by
in view the resource of
suicide be to
the masses, when the very wisest and loftiest minds, by lifelong
meditation, could rise no nearer to certainty than a perhaps